"For the past thirty years, Italian-born Pietro Cicognani has been designing highly customized and exquisitely crafted country houses, city apartments, outbuildings, pool houses, and even garden plans for an A-list clientele. In the first monograph on his work, some twenty of his most notable projects are featured, including a reconverted barn complex on Long Island, a sprawling estate in upstate New York, a chic minimalist townhouse in Manhattan, and a romantic seaside house and elaborate garden in the Hamptons. Whether a new construction or a gut renovation, each of his projects is designed in collaboration with the finest artisans and exceptional interior designers. Illustrated with specially commissioned photographs by renowned architecture and interiors photographer Francesco Lagnese, as well site plans and drawings, and featuring a foreword by actress Isabella Rossellini, whose country home he designed, Pietro Cicognani: Architecture and Design is a feast for the eyes and a celebration of unstinting design excellence"--

Arguing that Santi Cosma e Damiano was a reform convent, the author of this interdisciplinary study explores how its nuns employed art and architecture as a means to actively express their specific religious concerns. While focusing on the reconstruction of the history and construction of the convent, this study's larger concern is with the religious reform movement, and with the convent as a space for female self-realization in early modern Venice.

Focusing on buildings of the period between 1418 and 1580 and 35 key architects. Examines social context, religious beliefs, political power-structures, technical innovation, aesthetic judgement . Includes over 300 photographs, drawings, plans and reconstructions. Sure to be the recognized textbook for the foreseeable future.

Sicilian Baroque is the distinctive form of Baroque architecture that took hold on the island of Sicily in the 17th and 18th centuries, following an intensive surge of building in the wake of the devastating earthquake of 1693. This volume contains photographs and drawings and plans of this form of Baroque.

At first a successful painter of the Roman Baroque, Pietro (Berrettini) da Cortona (1597-1669) soon emerged as an architect of equal stature. This book is the first to focus full attention on Cortona's buildings and projects and to assess his position in Roman Baroque architecture. The book discusses Cortona's major commissions, particularly SS. Luca e Martina, the Villa del Pigneto, S. Maria della Pace, and S. Maria in Via Lata, as well as the designs that remained unbuilt, such as his plans for the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and the Louvre in Paris. Cortona's great decorative cycles, including Palazzo Barberini, the Chiesa Nuova, and others are also considered as part of his stunning vocabulary of architectural decoration. The book explores Cortona's relationships and rivalries with other outstanding Roman architects to illuminate the competitive climate in which he worked, and it concludes with a review of his influence and reputation into the twentieth century.

In the corridors of the Vatican on the eve of World War II, American Catholic priest Joseph Patrick Hurley found himself in the midst of secret diplomatic dealings and intense debate. Hurley’s deeply felt American patriotism and fixed ideas about confronting Nazism directly led to a mighty clash with Pope Pius XII. It was 1939, the earliest days of Pius’s papacy, and controversy within the Vatican over policy toward Nazi Germany was already heated. This groundbreaking book is both a biography of Joseph Hurley, the first American to achieve the rank of nuncio, or Vatican ambassador, and an insider’s view of the alleged silence of the pope on the Holocaust and Nazism. Drawing on Hurley’s unpublished archives, the book documents critical debates in Pope Pius’s Vatican, secret U.S.-Vatican dealings, the influence of Detroit’s flamboyant anti-Semitic priest Charles E. Coughlin, and the controversial case of Croatia’s Cardinal Stepinac. The book also sheds light on the powerful connections between religion and politics in the twentieth century.